admin Netflix just released the trailer for Maestro, starring Bradley Cooper as legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein. It’s the first movie Cooper has directed since his zeitgeist-dominating debut A Star Is Born in 2018, a film that won an Oscar for Best Original Song, along with seven other nominations. Notably none of them were for Best Actor or Best Director, an oversight Cooper presumably hopes to avenge with Maestro.
The focus of the biopic seems to be the West Side Story composer’s 25-year marriage to Costa Rican-American actress and activist Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein, played by Carey Mulligan. The two flirt, fight, and conduct in a trailer framed around a Central Park-based game of “guess what number I’m thinking of,” portrayed in a mix of color and black-and-white photography shot by A Star Is Born cinematographer Matthew Libatique (who also frequently collaborates with Darren Aronofsky). Mulligan’s portrayal in particular looks like a feast for fans of clipped, mid-century enunciation. Hepburn sisters eat your hearts out.
In the case of Bernstein and Montealegre, “tumultuous relationship” isn’t just boilerplate PR-speak. Montealegre initially broke off their engagement before embarking on a multi-year relationship with the actor Richard Hart, and only returned to Bernstein after Hart’s death. The two had three children together, notwithstanding the fact that Bernstein seems to have been gay or at least bisexual, having relationships with both men and women throughout his life. Montealegre once wrote to him, in a letter preserved by the Library of Congress, “You are a homosexual and may never change, let’s relax in the knowledge that neither of us is perfect.”
All of which is to say, plenty of material for an awards season film from a handful of awards darlings. The film will premiere next month at the Venice International Film Festival before a November theatrical run and a December 20th release on Netflix. In addition to directing, Cooper also co-wrote the script, with Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post, First Man) and co-produced alongside Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.
If Bradley Cooper seems like too goyish a choice to play Leonard Bernstein, consider that Cooper once played the Elephant Man on stage without makeup. The man is an act-tor. And now, it seems, a direct-tor.
